Microsoft: IE9 will be Windows only

Microsoft will not be creating versions of IE9 for platforms other than Windows, Mark Quirk, IE9 product manager, has told Pocket-lint. Nor will it operate on XP.

“Windows is a business we know,” Quirk told us after we asked him if there were plans to bring Microsoft’s new browser to other platform’s like Apple’s Mac OS X or the upcoming Chrome OS from Google. “There are no plans to bring the browser to any other platforms.”

Microsoft instead will concentrate on developing its browser for Windows users around the world.

It wasn’t always that way though, in 1997 Microsoft and Apple signed a five year deal that saw Internet Explorer as the default browser until Safari launched in 2003. At that point, Microsoft gave up developing its IE browser for the platform.

IE9, launched on 14 March (in the US, 15 March in the UK due to time difference), will work on Windows Vista and Windows 7, with Windows XP users being left out for the first time.

It brings a number of new features to the browser, including hardware acceleration, tracking protection, and a new minimalist design:

“The less the browser gets in the way the better,” Quirk told us, as he showed how simple the window design is compared to Firefox and Chrome. “It’s all about the websites you go to, not the browsers you use. Most people want the back button, URL bar and that’s it.”

Quirk and his team also believe that there will be massive take up by the Internet Explorer faithful:

“We expect upgrades to be quiet high,” Quirk told us in a one-to-one interview.

So what’s next, Internet Explorer 10 perhaps? Quirk wouldn’t tell us exactly, but did cryptically hint that his team is "certainly not going to make another browser.”